ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the impression gained from Michael Chekhov work of the attitude to religion among other classes, of the rites, observances and sacraments of the church, of the role of the white or parish clergy. In Imperial Russia the state of the Orthodox Church confirmed, for the revolutionary parties, the inferences which Marx had drawn. Even the church’s own affairs were controlled from 1721 by the Holy Synod, a board modelled on similar bodies in the German protestant states. The congregation played the same passive role in church as in political life, and there was indeed an evident similarity between the Russian ideas of religion as primarily praise. The importance of the Church in the national consciousness, in the routine of daily life, is brought home to the reader in innumerable ways. Churches with their cupolas and far-shining cross enter into the description of every village of any size; in towns they are innumerable.
